Let’s see if I got this right:

The federally accused thief of classified documents says he can’t stand trial in a timely fashion because he’s too darn busy running for president, devoting “a tremendous amount of time and energy” to recapturing the government that he previously sought to overthrow and summoned his goons to vandalize…after which he stole the aforementioned classified documents that he refused to give back, which is why he’s scheduled to stand trial in the first place.

Yeah, I got that right.

Lewis Carroll and Joseph Heller have clearly teamed up in the afterlife to craft Trump’s latest con. How else to explain the sick spectacle of a twice-indicted sociopath running for president for the express purpose of using his candidacy as a shield against conviction and jail?

That’s the gist of what his beleaguered lawyers filed in federal court earlier this week. He asked the judge to delay his trial indefinitely…to some future date to be determined in the future…so that meanwhile he can win the ’24 GOP nomination, win the election, get sworn in again, then hire some Justice Department flunkies who will junk the 37 felony counts.

Granted, his court filing didn’t say any of that. But it doesn’t take a stable genius to decode the flowery fancy language, like when his lawyers say they need “time for development of further clarity as to the full nature and scope” of the classified-documents case. They need lots more time to gain “a better understanding” of the charges, because the federal prosecutors’ target date for a trial – in December – is way too soon.

The MAGA lawyers declare: “President Trump is running for President of the United States and is currently the likely Republican Party nominee. This undertaking requires a tremendous amount of time and energy, and that effort will continue until the election of November 5, 2024…Proceeding to trial during the pendency of a Presidential election…will…limit (Trump’s) ability to secure a fair and impartial adjudication.”

That’s a fatuous argument, because we all know that if Trump were to win the election and wind up back in power, he’d claim that any trial would still be unfair, because the jury pool would surely include citizens who’d voted against him. And if he did manage to occupy the Oval again, he’d naturally say that he was too darn busy with his job to ever stand trial. In the words of former federal prosector Dennis Aftergut, “He would have his own Justice Department declare the indictment a witch hunt, end the prosecution, and turn the tables on his enemies.”

Mary McCord, a former assistant attorney general who currently directs the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, says that Trump “is not the first person to say to a judge, ‘I have this really busy schedule.’ And to the extent that a judge can make accommodations for someone’s career or their candidacy while still moving promptly toward trial and taking into consideration societal interests, there is some measure of trying to accommodate. But I don’t think it goes so far as what Mr. Trump’s attorneys are trying to do, which is put this off indefinitely, and certainly until after the election, because he’s a candidate. He chose to be a candidate while he had investigations pending against him. And he has a responsibility, like anyone who is facing charges, to go through our criminal justice system.”

So, having been caught red-handed, and facing a mountain of damning evidence, Trump’s only play right now is to delay and delay. For decades he has used that strategy to elude accountability, but what’s unique now is his galling contention that the mere act of running for office affords him protection from the cops.

Imagine if the average loser tried to pull a grift like that: “Your honor, I can’t go on trial for shoplifting any time soon because I’m gonna be too busy gathering signatures to run for something.”

If you agree with me that his procrastination ploy is an insult to the rule of law, rest assured you aren’t alone. According to a new national poll, a landslide 62 percent of Americans want the classified-doc trial to take place before the next presidential election, and 57 percent want it to happen before the Republican primaries. And if Trump were convicted at trial before the election, even 28 percent of Republicans say they’d be less likely to vote for him. That may not sound like a huge percentage, but he and his team know they can ill afford any erosion of support, particularly from the party base.

Hence their desperate contention that the trial should be delayed indefinitely due to the time-consuming “magnitude of the case.” How ironic. Trump gave this case maximum magnitude, by dint of his thievery and his unsecured storage within inches of his toilet…and now he’s invoking this magnitude as a defense against a timely trial. It’s a creative message: Too Big to Prosecute.

But maybe he’s right in one key respect: With a New York trial scheduled for next March (on his alleged faking of business records to hide hush payments to his porn lady), and with yet more indictments likely in the summer pipeline (in the federal Jan. 6 case, and/or the federal fake-electors case, and/or Georgia’s attempted coup case), he might be very darn busy after all.